Donovan delivers Oct. 28 Honors Council Lecture

October 25, 2013

Dr. Brian Donovan, a professor of English at Bemidji State University, will deliver an Honors Council Lecture on Isocratres’ successful educational approach of nature, theory and practice, and the educational relationship between teacher and student.

Donovan’s presentation, “Isocrates on Nature, Theory and Practice,” will be held Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. in Hagg Sauer 112 on the Bemidji State campus. Honors Council Lectures are open to the public free of charge.

Donovan has been a member of BSU’s English department since 1990. He graduated from Amherst College with a degree in English in 1977, and then began graduate studies in rhetoric and composition at the University of Iowa. There, he completed seven semesters of Ancient Greek, the language of the first theorists of rhetoric. The individualized learning he found in that program led him to seek out another doctoral program in rhetoric and composition, which he completed at the State University of New York at Albany after moving from Iowa City to the eastern seaboard by bicycle.

His doctoral dissertation and subsequent scholarly publications and conference presentations have all focused on ancient Greek rhetoric, as did his research during two full-year sabbatical leaves, which he spent in a village near Mount Olympus in Greece with his wife and children. The present lecture derives from the more recent of these sabbatical research projects, which he pursued while living on the north coast of Crete this past academic year.

The Honors Council Lecture Series is hosted by the Bemidji State University Honors Council. The council is the advisory group to the honors program comprised of 12 faculty members from each of the University’s colleges. Student representatives are also elected to the council by their cohorts for one-year terms.

For more information about the Honors Council Lecture Series, please contact the honors program at (218) 755-3984.